Anthony T. Kronman's EDUCATION'S END in Commentary Magazine

Education's End by Anthony T. Kronman
Reviewed by Ben Wildavsky
Commentary Magazine, April 2008

Anthony Kronman tells two compelling stories in this new book on the demise of the humanities. The first is brief and autobiographical. In the mid-1960’s, he dropped out of Williams College, eager to give his life meaning by taking an active part in the great social changes of his time. He spent seven months in Chicago, ringing doorbells and attending meetings as a community organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. But the sense of purpose he was seeking eluded him, and before long he was back at Williams. There, enrolling in a seminar on existentialism, he was soon eagerly anticipating intense weekly discussions of Kierkegaard, Sartre, and the Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Not only was the course’s central question—how best to live—a weighty one, but, he writes, he learned something unexpected and life-changing: “the meaning of life is a subject that can be studied in school.” This conviction, in turn, led Kronman to his life’s work as an academic. Armed with a law degree and a Ph.D. in philosophy, he has spent most of his career as a professor and dean at Yale Law School, and in recent years has taught in the university’s elite freshman humanities program. It also led him to write this extended manifesto. For, after decades in the university, Kronman is saddened and alarmed that a subject that should by rights be at the center of an undergraduate education—“the exploration of life’s mystery and meaning through the careful but critical reading of the great works of literary and philosophical imagination”—has instead been relegated to “the margins of professional respectability.” Hence his second, more detailed story: an earnest, densely reasoned account of just how this happened, and how it might be fixed

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